7.6.14

‘The Beast’ Asteroid Set to Pass Earth on June 8th

On Sunday, June 8th, an asteroid nicknamed “The Beast” will approach
uncomfortably close to the Earth – 3.25 times the distance between the
Earth and the moon, to be exact.

The passing is uncomfortable for a couple of reasons:
1) Any space object nicknamed “The Beast” should be fear inducing no
matter how close it is; and 2) The massive asteroid was only detected
six weeks ago, much too late for NASA or any other agency to have
diverted the path of such an asteroid if it was on a collision course
with Earth.

The asteroid, officially named 2014 HQ124, lives up to its nickname when one looks at the numbers behind the story.

“The Beast” measures in at 1,100 feet (335 meters) in diameter –
similar in size to a movie theater, football stadium, or a Nimitz-class
aircraft carrier. Currently, the asteroid is hurtling through space at a
speed of 31,000 mph. If it was to enter Earth’s gravitational field,
its speed would increase to 40,000 mph by the time of impact.

Asteroid impact expert Mark Boslough, of Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, shed some light on how devastating an asteroid of such proportions and traveling at such high speeds would do to the Earth:

What’s disconcerting is that a rocky/metallic body
this large, and coming so very close, should have only first been
discovered this soon before its nearest approach. HQ124 is at least 10
times bigger, and possibly 20 times, than the asteroid that injured a
thousand people last year in Chelyabinsk, Siberia… If it were to impact
us, the energy released would be measured not in kilotons like the
atomic bombs that ended World War II, but in H-bomb type megatons… You’d
end up with a crater about 3 miles across. An event like that would
break windows over 100 kilometers away.

To add some further perspective, the atomic bomb that was dropped on
Hiroshima exploded with 15 kilotons of force, while “The Beast” would
impact the Earth with a 2,000 megaton explosion. (1,000 kilotons equals 1
megaton.)

If that news wasn’t disconcerting enough, NASA officials estimate
that only 30 percent of the estimated 15,000 near-Earth asteroids
measuring 460 feet in diameter have been discovered, while less than 1
percent of those measuring in with a diameter of 100 feet have been
found.